7 - Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja

Summary

The works explored thus far in this volume have, in different ways and through different approaches, grappled with Empire's signification of time, space, and bodies, confronting imperial taxonomies of human life while offering interrogations of the performance of subjectivity in relation to power. Following up on these examinations, the remaining two chapters map proposals for alternative, non-imperial conceptualizations of global time and space. These tentative forms of narrativization do not operate in terms of a utopian new beginning in a world untouched by Empire. Instead, they trace the emergence of alternative epistemologies over and against Empire's field of meaning, particularly its categorizations of bodies and lands.

This has very much been the case with the œuvre of Olinda Beja, which evokes, appropriates, and reworks Empire's signifiers in order to remap the signified terrain of power while bringing about anti-imperial forms of local and global consciousness. For Beja, this project is closely tied to her own personal trajectory. An acclaimed poet, she is also the author of two novels and three collections of short stories, and is regarded as one the leading literary voices of São Tomé and Príncipe, the West African archipelago along the equator. Born in the São Toméan town of Guadalupe in 1946, she was raised under Portuguese colonial rule. She has lived most of her life, however, outside of São Tomé and Príncipe after a childhood move to Portugal followed by prolonged residence there and in Switzerland. This has undoubtedly contributed to her work both in terms of experiences to place on the page and a unique lens through which to perceive the world, beyond São Tomé and Príncipe and the former imperial metropolis.

Her first collection of poetry, Bô Tendê? [‘Do You Understand?’] (1992), offers numerous poems reflecting on the consequences of moving to Europe as a young African girl, and learning about herself and the world through imperial pedagogy. Within this particular collection, the poem ‘Visão’ [‘Vision'] provides a visceral example of this, beginning with the very first lines:

Quiseram fazer de mim uma europeia

e por esse motivo me arrancaram

das costas de mãe-África, minha mãe. (14)

[They wanted to make me European

and for that reason they pulled me

from the back of Mother Africa, my mother.]